Rochester & Monroe Co., NY

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Advent Calender – Christmas Tree

There is blog called GeneaBloggers that suggests topics for us genealogy bloggers. They are having a kind of “Advent Calender” for the Christmas season. The first suggestion asks if we had a real or artificial Christmas trees. We had real trees and for a good reason. From the early 1950s to the mid 1960s my parents owned a fruit an vegetable business and at Christmas time we sold Christmas trees. We had hundreds of trees and people would shop for a long time before making a selection. In most cases that meant we have to hold the tree up for customers to look at while they looked at the tree from every angle. We had the trees tagged with color ribbons that coincided to the price. As well as I can remember, and my memory has proven to be full of holes, we never charged over $20 for a very large tree. That being around 15 foot. Most trees were in the $10 to $15 price range.

The trees were marked down extremely after Dec. 25th but we would still sell some after the 25th. The reason was that there was one neighborhood nearby that celebrated Russian Christmas which is on Jan 7th. They were smart to wait to get a tree after Dec. 25th to get a bargain.

Seeing as we had the pick of trees you would think that we had the best. The problem is that once the trees are taken inside the branches drop. Sometimes you end up with a large empty area that didn’t show up outside. Once or twice we had a tree that was so wide that it took up a good portion of our living room.

Then there were trees that dropped needles so fast that by Christmas there were more in the trash than on the tree. The best part of having a real tree is the wonderful pine smell.